


everyone knows you're going to love (though there's still no cure for crying)

by whyyesitscar



Category: Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:49:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2197599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whyyesitscar/pseuds/whyyesitscar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"I have been a coward before. Maddie keeps me brave."</i> // Fix-it fic, Julie and Maddie reunite after the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everyone knows you're going to love (though there's still no cure for crying)

**Author's Note:**

> A few months ago I downloaded this audiobook but it's only recently that I got around to listening to it and it DESTROYED me, so of course I had to write something to get all of my feelings out. _Man_ , these two.

> _Come, words, away,_  
>  _And tell with me a story here,_  
>  _Forgetting what’s been said already:_  
>  _That hell of hasty mouths removes_  
>  _Into a cancelled heaven of mercies_  
>  _By flight of words back to this plan_  
>  _Whose grace goes out in utmost rings  
> _ _To bounds of utmost storyhood._   
> **-** **-excerpt from "Come, Words, Away", Laura Riding**

She was serious, that's what stopped me.

Maddie was rarely serious. Oh sure, she'd cry at the drop of a hat, and she couldn't bear to break any sort of rule. But she did it with a smile and a joke so often that I'd started taking it for granted. Or maybe that's how I'd wanted to remember her, my quiet English girl with a mess of curly hair and a smile that could fortify an army. It fortified me, at any rate; I can think of little else that got me through those weeks in Ormaie.

But there she was, standing in my nuisance of a house, her face somber and sincere as she said things that normally came with a grin and a laugh. 

I've always listened to Maddie. Perhaps I should have listened to her more, listened to her rules that were forever calling me foolish. But it doesn't do to think about the past and things I cannot change. She was there that day, dripping rain onto my expensive rug, crying, and even though every inch of me wanted to chuckle at the familiarity of it, I listened.

I have been a coward before. Maddie keeps me brave.

/

She was the one who saved me. Maddie will surely blame herself for my lost years, but I’d have died without her. I was prepared to die in that field, hoped for it, even. It would have been a more merciful fate than withering away in some camp, tossed aside like a dirty rag that smears more than cleans when you use it enough.

I was lying on the ground in that French field, surrounded by prisoners far braver than me. They were going to die in that camp, same as me, but I was the one who deserved it.  I knew these fields. Not this one specifically, but I’d played in others like it when I was a girl. Jamie in particular loved to pull up grass by the roots and drop it over my eyes if ever I decided to close them. There were cousins too, sometimes; I think I’ve forgotten their names. It feels like I’ve forgotten everything before the war, or perhaps I’ve just forgotten every me. Who was I before Eva Seiler, or Käthe Habicht?

Who was I before Maddie?

I know who I am with Maddie. I certainly hope I never have to learn who I am after.

It’s all a bit of a blur, trying to recall how I got away. Funny—I can remember every day of my captivity, or at least the days I was conscious. I had a purpose then; I lived for the opportunities to write. It felt like I was doing something important, even though it was nothing more than a glorified stalling tactic. I was lying.

I can say that now, with the war a year in the past. They felt like truths, but they were utter lies. Maddie’s told me that Engel gave her my pages. I’m glad; I don’t think I could have told her otherwise, and I couldn’t bear it if she didn’t know.

Those six weeks I spent writing, I had focus. I had a purpose, misguided though it may have been. Standing in a field in the middle of France, under a night sky so dark you think, maybe even hope, that you’re dead—well, it has a way of rendering that purpose irrelevant and useless. 

The Gestapo officers hauled me up with two men and picked them off ruthlessly, one at a time. One _limb_ at a time. I watched as kneecaps shattered, heard the sickening crack as elbows were obliterated. One of the men had to be guided back to the bus; the other, mercifully, succumbed to the shock and pain, and blacked out. I knew I wouldn’t be so lucky; I had been trained to keep my composure longer than most, to endure under even the most strenuous of circumstance.

My hands were tied behind my back. Prisoners, captors, and revolutionaries alike were dwindling by the second, being picked off by whichever gunfire could reach them first. Being killed by a lucky shot was not a luxury I would be afforded—the man holding me would either make an example out of me or shoot me in a matter of minutes. I had no hope of rescue.

And then I heard her.

A floodlight passed over my face, blinding me for just a moment, and I heard her cry. Her wonderful, inevitable, familiar cry. Maddie was with me, though I could not see her. It was just the thought of her that gave me strength, as it had for so many weeks. She cried and I thought of the first time I’d really heard it, before she gunned down that plane. I thought of how devastated she’d been to see my bruises after that dreadful interrogation. I thought of Maddie and how I envied her sensitivity, sensitivity that I’d either forgotten how to feel or learned to ignore. I didn’t know which was worse.

I thought of Maddie, and I laughed.

“Kiss me, Hardy; kiss me, quick!”

A shot rang out and I flinched in spite of myself. I closed my eyes and sighed, waiting to fall, waiting to feel the welcome relief of a damp field, blades of grass softer than anything I’d touched since landing in France.

The guard behind me, instead, fell lifeless on the ground.

Maddie had missed.

I could never have proved it, but I knew it was her gun. She would have understood me, I knew that. The bullet in the Gestapo officer’s neck had been fired from Maddie’s gun, and it was meant for me. _That_ is what gave me the motivation to run—the thought, the horrifying idea that I might squander the opportunity she’d just given me, accidentally or with conviction, spurred my legs into action even as my arms bounced uselessly against my back.

I ran forward as fast as I could, hoping eventually to run into her.

It was Maddie who ran into me, in the end. 

/

November had gone chilly and wet by the time she found me. Jamie and I were still at home, tending to his band of rascals. It was a quiet life, one I’d have hated before the war. Every morning my mother woke me up, and I faced the day as Julie Beaufort-Stuart. Not Queenie or Eva or Käthe. I was just Julie, and Jamie was just Jamie, and if I focused on that sometimes I could forget about his fingers.

Jamie was the one to answer the door. I’m glad of it; I wouldn’t have known what to say if I’d seen her on the steps. He ushered her in and called me down. I took my time walking—not intentionally, of course, but I was glad for that, too.

I hadn’t actually seen her the night she set me free, but she looked at me as I imagined she had then, with wide, baleful eyes that betrayed either happiness or great turmoil; I couldn’t tell which. Maddie’s hair crumpled against her cheeks, making her look forlorn and subdued. I wondered if this is what she had looked like for the three years we’d been apart; if every time she’d thought of me, she’d gone all sad, her face wilting like a flower without water. Maddie was hardly a flower anyway—she’d have rolled her eyes at the association—but I couldn’t help being reminded of a sunflower that had lost its sun.

“Hello,” I finally offered.

“Three years of total silence, and all you say is ‘hello’?” Her words bit and snapped, meant to be cruel, but I heard the hitch at the end. It sounded like choking.

Here I was, completely baffled and relieved to see the one person I’d been yearning to see for three years, and I was on the verge of laughing at Maddie’s overactive tear ducts.

“Yes, hello,” I smiled, bridging the gap. “‘Hello’ and ‘you look marvelous’ and ‘it is so’”—and here I did a little choking of my own—“ _so_ very good to see you.”

“Marvelous,” Maddie scoffed. “All this English rain is anything but marvelous.”

“Scottish,” I immediately corrected. “That, Maddie, is Scottish rain.”

“I know.”

She tried her hardest to hide her smile, but Maddie could never hide anything from me. Once upon a time I used to be excellent at hiding from her, but we knew all of each other’s secrets now.

“Come on,” I said, clearing my throat, “let’s get you cleaned up.”

Maddie and I made our way up one of my many ostentatious staircases. I half expected her to gawk at their opulence until I remembered that she’d been here already. A wave of embarrassment rushed through me where it never had before—what she must have thought when she came here and found my childhood home, a mansion so large it could have been someone else’s unattainable dream. I stopped being impressed by it long ago, but what did Maddie think? Did she ever resent me for it; did she ever realize that I was little more than a rich girl playing at being a spy?

I was a born liar and Maddie had never done anything but tell the truth. I wondered if she’d figured that out yet.

My clothes were too small for her and I didn’t want to offer them anyway; I could wear them if I truly wanted but I’d stopped fitting them long ago. It was alright, either way. We’d spent so long wearing government-issued men’s pajamas that Maddie smiled when I offered her some of Jamie’s things.

She went into the bathroom to change and handed me soggy clothes through the cracked-open door. They smelled of cold and rain but I was glad for the distraction. What was it I’d said to her so many lifetimes ago?

_If you’re scared, do something._

I was terrified.

“Do you want to know where I’ve been?” I asked later, once we had retired to the stifling silence of my bedroom. 

“Not now,” she answered. “Maybe not for a long time.” She flopped back on my bed and sighed. “Just—were you hiding? All those years, were you hiding or have you been here this whole time?” 

This time I did laugh. “How in the world would I have managed to make my way back here?”

“You could have done. You can do anything.”

“Oh, Maddie…” I’d meant to only think it but the words came out unbidden. Maddie smiled and I was glad again. “I _was_ hiding,” I affirmed. “I couldn’t have gone back to the Thibault’s farm, you know that.”

“I know, but—you couldn’t have gotten very far away.”

“From the farm, or from you?" 

She didn’t answer, so I kept going.

“I’ve never been far away from you, Maddie. Especially not then.”

“I know.”

I smiled again and lay down next to her. “You keep saying that. Is there anything you don’t know?”

“I don’t know if you’re mad at me.”

“ _Mad_ at you?” I laughed, the sound bursting out of me like gunfire. Perhaps that’s why she flinched so violently. “Mad at you for what?”

Maddie turned her head away from mine. Her tears were silent this time, and I wondered if growing up just meant learning that there is more pain in this world than you can imagine—and it is always the same, and it is always different. Maddie’s tears now had sophistication, where before they had noise. I wondered where she’d learned it, and feared it might have been from me.

“For not shooting you,” she finally said.

“I’d be dead if you had.”

“Wasn’t that the point?” So sharp and worried, my Maddie. “I didn’t get that wrong, Julie. You wanted me to shoot you.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And I didn’t. I let you down.”

“Maddie.” I turned my head on its side, craning my neck and looking upwards at her. I’d forgotten how small I’d always felt next to her. Small, that was the important part. Small but never little. I waited until she craned her neck toward me as well.

“You didn’t let me down. You could never.”

“I missed, though.”

“And I’m here because of it, and so are you. We’re both alive and together again.”

“If I’d missed and you hadn’t gotten away, if you had gone to whatever camp they were taking you—would you hate me?”

“No,” I whispered, on the verge of tears myself. “I would have missed you rather fiercely. I would have ached to see you again. Meeting you—knowing you—has enriched my life. The memory of you would have sustained me; maybe not until the end of the war, but long enough. I wouldn’t have hated you, Maddie. Loved, never hated.”

“Loved?”

“Of course.”

Maddie laughed—more of a gasp, really, but I wasn’t going to split hairs—and shifted her face ever closer to mine. “Kiss me, Julie.”

“Hardy,” I corrected.

“No. Julie.”

So I did. 

/

(I have been kissed before—some of them memorable, most of them not—but none of them tender this way; none of them honest this way; none of them Maddie. She is a sunflower, I will stand by that now. Her lips taste of pickled onions and engine oil, stained with memories of our past lives, separate and shared. She kisses me with the whole of her and I can only offer the same of myself, and she makes it seem more than enough.

It will never be enough, you see; I will never stop kissing Maddie or loving Maddie. But there on a bed I never dreamed we’d share, in a house I’d never dreamed she’d see, Maddie filled me up. Maddie made me whole, and I have been so broken.

I have been so broken. Maddie kissed me in stitches.)

/

Maddie will not stay with me forever, at least not here. She’s beginning to get restless, especially now that she’s seen I can move with almost the same control I had before I was captured. (She offers me a cane now and again. Now and again, I take it.) I finally had to reveal that my injuries had healed years ago; that I was given refuge by a wonderful French woman who would not tell me her name, but who fed me and cared for me until I could tell her mine. Maddie would have listened to more of the story but I couldn’t bear to tell it. I wrote it down instead, over the span of a couple weeks, and it was only after she’d finished reading that Maddie said she wanted to leave.

She’s sitting with me now, watching me write, and I can tell that she knows I’m writing about her. There is a smirk on her face that keeps coming back even after constant attempts to squash it— _god_ , how I wish it could stay forever—and she twiddles her fingers close to my pages as if she’s going to steal them. She’s like a dog sometimes, playful and curious any time she thinks I might have mentioned her name. Curls fall in her face after her most recent stolen glance and I soften, putting down my pen and leaning back in my chair.

“What will we do out in the world, you and I, hmm?” I ask. “What will we do outside of these castle walls?”

“What we did before, I suppose,” she shrugs.

“The war’s over, Maddie.”

“But we weren’t always fighting a war, were we?” She laughs and reaches across the table. I make to move my papers out of the way, my exaggerated gestures almost toppling the inkwell, but Maddie grasps my hand instead. She surprises me, my Maddie. “You could go back to university,” she offers. 

“ _You_ could go to university,” I quip.

Maddie wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. “You could write books.”

“You could take over your granddad’s shop.”

“You could be an actress.”

“Oh, I think I already am,” I laugh. “An actress with everyone, save for you.”

She laughs, then, and kisses the back of my hand. “You could be mine.” 

“I know.” I get a glare for that one. “I am,” I amend, laughing with her. “You know I am.”

“Are you still afraid of getting old?”

“I don’t know. Grow old with me anyway.”

Always laughing at me, Maddie is. Sometimes I think I’m funny just to hear her laugh.

When she sees me the next morning, parked at the bottom of the stairs with a bulging suitcase and tapping an impatient toe, she laughs again, and even though I have had problems with it in the past, I know it’s the truth.

Maddie is the truth of me.


End file.
